Hypnotist

She stops in her tracks.

Her gaze is at sea.

“Doesn't it look like a portal to another dimension?" She asks.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a perfect mirror. We see the reflection of sky on glassy water. But we cannot see underneath. It looks like ocean slices Earth. It looks like we could walk across the sea. I wonder if we are standing on the rawest, ripest edge of this world.” She says, arms stretching outwards, her words floating overseas to faraway islands.

"I wonder what your mind thinks about. Just the way you see things seems so ... different."

The two friends walk side-by-side along the beach. Blazing sunlight strips the shoreline of all shade, baking the girls, and firmly planting them in the terrestrial world. Their footprints stretch back as far as the eye can see. Why, all of a sudden, did she stop to address the depths?

She's gripped.

The ocean has her hook, line, and sinker. It pulls her to places on maps which are mostly blue. Just like the mighty tides, she washes up on shores in the remotest corners of the Earth. Wind itself seems to carry the island. She imagines floating across the deep blue ocean, witnessed by silent constellations and nothing more. She feels a deep need for the sound of waves and the silence underneath. It’s a maddening love affair.

The ocean is, of course, perfectly impartial.

On land she’s a lion, but underwater she’s a lamb. Currents shepherd her. Tides pull her in. Meek in the face of all things, she’s an aware visitor, just taking a peek. Deep, indigo water lures her, further and further, pulling on her curiosity. Soon she loses sight of shore.

The coral reef is alive with clicking shrimp. The sound makes her feel at home, all at once. She’s lost in corals that are shaped like horns and plastered to rock. She swims past those which whisk through the waves like a fern more delicate than any land has ever known. It’s mesmerizing. She’s careful to let not even a surge of water from her fins crush their ornate tendrils.

But there’s a focus in the water. It’s where a predator’s gaze meets prey. A cuttlefish stares into a crevice. It must have noticed something stirring. In a flash, through unbroken silence, the cuttlefish radiates new colors. It turns from purple to white, to orange, to white again. Cuttlefish rely on a flashing white, which is so unlike the colors of the reef, to enchant its fish.

Predictably, prey emerges. The tiny damselfish is a kindred creature to the girl, pulled by curiosity. It ventures from the rock, just as the girl swims beyond mankind. Its mind is too wide, too open. It grew up in a psychadelic, coral world.

More colors display between flashes of white across the cuttlefish’s body. It fastens itself to mimic a torpedo, stringy arms aiming at the fish.

There’s an innocence in its aura. The petite fish wonders, is that the sun? Such a sweet trick to play at dusk, she muses. The fish stares with bulging eyes. It swishes its tail, coming closer to the flashing white light. She saw its miniscule jaw drop, revealing teeth only big enough to scrape algae from rocks.

The cuttlefish pounces, with a mere blink she misses the action. The damselfish has already been swallowed whole.

The cuttlefish, a true lion, immediately searches the reef for its next victim. It floats past her, like an alien ship voyaging across space. She follows the colorful beast. The curious girl is safe, too big for cuttlefish beaks, but hypnotized all the same.